The perverse attachment boxing fans have to losers over winners in the UK is no myth. Take Kell Brook and Matthew Macklin.

Macklin lost, bravely and with honour, to the best middleweight in the world, Sergio Martínez, in the theatre of Madison Square Garden on Saturday night. This was just a few hours after Brook turned in the most complete performance of his career to beat Matthew Hatton in Sheffield. No guessing which fighter excited most adverse comment.

The late-night world of Twitter accommodates all sorts of boxing enthusiasts, from the sensible to the vitriolic – and a few of them still do not get Brook.

In his 27th bout Brook handed 50-fight Hatton a lesson in ring dynamics and strategy. There was not a respected voice in the sport – from Barry McGuigan to the Great Britain Olympic squad boxer Tom Stalker – who did not praise the unbeaten welterweight for his near punch-perfect performance, his balance and composure in a shutout that will have impressed the game-makers across the Atlantic.

Brook can be a superstar, the sort of fighter to light up British rings like his hero, Naseem Hamed, once did. (The Prince, incidentally, just about filled the TV screen on his own when Sky interviewed him before the fight. Clearly he is enjoying his retirement.) But on Saturday Brook offended the midnight moaners: he called out Amir Khan.

This placed the cynics in an unusual position. Many of them do not like Khan either but they are not having some "upstart" shouting for a world title fight with him.

One tweeter said Brook would be out of his depth at the highest level, while another said Hatton was not much of a test anyway (although this view was not widely broadcast beforehand).

When he called for a Khan fight, one doubter tweeted: "Seems Kell Brook is starting to believe his own hype now!" Hours earlier the same sceptic had been criticising Brook because he was in with an overrated Hatton. How does he win?

None of this, by the way, was based on any deep analysis of his boxing. The fact is that the younger man boxed quite brilliantly on the angles, won every round, decked Hatton and, had he pushed it, might have stopped him – something the feted Mexican Saul Alvarez, supposedly the hottest prospect in the business, could not do when he defended his world title against Hatton last year.

The reluctance to support homegrown fighters does not usually happen anywhere else. Latinos have utter belief in their fighters. So do Americans, even if they do not have much to cheer about. Who do they think they are, is the moan here, driving around in fancy cars and wearing flash gear, with tasty birds in tow, demanding world title fights?

The obvious answer to the naysayers is they are not them. These are athletes who put everything on the line – including their lives – for the entertainment for those who dare not or cannot do it themselves. The sacrifices they make in pursuit of the money and the glory would be beyond 99% of the people who pay to watch them. That is the deal.

Yet you can be on your last pay cheque and they will be there to cheer and boo if Brook does fight Hatton.

"Money talks," Brook's promoter, Eddie Hearn, said. "We've sold 10,000 for Kell Brook v Matthew Hatton. I could sell 40,000 tickets for Kell Brook against Amir Khan. It's a pay-per-view fight. It's probably one of the few fights that is going to bring back pay-per-view television to British boxing."

I hope Brook gets his fight with Khan. I also hope Khan gets his titles back in his return with Lamont Peterson in Las Vegas on 19 May. I wish Peterson the best, too. In fact, a boxer has to do something pretty terrible for me not at least to hope he does his best and does not get seriously hurt.

Sometimes boxers do themselves no favours, as we have witnessed recently.

But sometimes the fans let themselves down too. Of course, they are entitled to their opinions and no doubt there will be plenty of bloggers ready to rip my head off below the line here. But they should occasionally ask themselves why they follow boxing in the first place.

Where to now?

Hatton, meanwhile, has reached his peak. He dreams still of another world title shot but that now becomes a distant hope. If he had extra snap in his big shots, or a little more magic to provide more than regulation challenge to an opponent … well, he would be Kell Brook.

Hard to say what Macklin's next move is. There was no disgrace in losing to Martínez, a very special fighter, probably in the top three best pound-for-pound in the world, after Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.

After a cautious start the Birmingham-born Irishman boxed with keen intelligence in the middle rounds, abandoning the rumble-forward style that should have won him the world title against Felix Sturm last year. For a while Macklin even beat Martínez at his own cat-and-mouse game. He got lucky when a short right caught the champion off balance in the seventh and Martínez touched down after their legs tangled. That gave the challenger a 10-8 round, the last flicker of encouragement before the Argentinian's movement, speed and power broke him down. Two southpaw left crosses did the damage towards the end of the 11th and Macklin's trainer, Buddy McGirt, would not let him go out for what would almost certainly have been a proper pasting in the 12th.

Macklin still has ambition. He reckons he is good enough to win a world title but, when he reflects on the fight, he could be forced to the conclusion that his career is closer to that of Hatton than Brook. He might have to rebuild with domestic fights against Martin Murray and Darren Barker.

Maybe Sturm will give him a rematch for his WBA "super" version of the title – because there seems little likelihood he will risk taking it out of Germany and putting it on the line against Martínez, who holds the WBC's "diamond" belt.

Martínez? He has a mandatory against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr but his promoter, Lou Di Bellal, will probably hold out for a much bigger fight against either Pacquiao or Mayweather.